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Archive for May, 2010

I have been traveling by a 2/4 wheeler to my work place for nearly 5 years now..the one thing that catches my attention amidst all the day dreaming that i do is the sight of an ambulance. It gets me to think of the person lying on the bed inside the van who doesn’t have time on his hand, as much as anyone else on the road struggling to get to his/her work place/destination.
More worried than him are his relatives sitting around him, watching him hold and pull it off until the ambulance reaches the hospital…no situation can be worse than that…when you have to sit inside and peep out of the ambulance window to see the traffic piling up ahead and the ambulance struggling to make its way through the tedious clogging traffic..when you know you can’t do much but sit and wait to get to hospital…you would just feel like getting on to the mike and announcing/begging/ pleading/yelling to make way to the ambulance, deaf-struck people might just care enough to respond then?!
Its a scary scene really. I wonder if this is the plight of an ambulance in any other part of the better world.
Question: How can the Indian traffic Police afford to be so unresponsive to ambulance sirens? when they are taught and trained to handle such emergencies, why cant they act immediately, why exhibit such lethargy and put up a Don’t Care attitude?
I live in Sadashivnagar. For those who haven’t heard of this area in Bangalore, this is where the Who’s Who of Bangalore live…well known ministers of India to Celebrities to businessmen dwell in the state-of-the-art houses here… Sadashivnagar has some of the best 5 star/luxury hotels like Le Meridian, Hotel Ashoka, Windsor Manor, etc in its close proximity.
So guess what, when i travel back home after work, sometimes I end up waiting on roads in traffic for hours together waiting for the police to let go off the traffic after the ministers convoy has passed amidst elaborate security. Traffic comes to a dead halt till the convoy has reached the next signal junction and the escorts that accompany the convoy are out of site…What amazes me is that the coordination amongst the police at different junctions is so great that more often than not, the convoy, amidst all the chaos of Bangalore traffic, manages to maintain a speed of 40-50kmph.

This takes some good coordination and effort from the police.Is it so hard to implement this with ambulances, especially now, with all the V2V communication
gadgets? I wonder…

Sad to say, but my response to ambulance sirens has relaxed as well. Now I know better than to just honk at the person ahead of me in traffic, and act like I could make some difference, coz its simply too well known to me now that unless all the civilians are aware of what to do, one person alone can’t shake a grass. One just got to be responsive enough in such a situation that demands Action. To pass the message and let the circle inspector know that he needs to make way for the ambulance and act instantly, and then have the inspector react…Not happening … 😦
To me, Ambulance alerts and signals have become a part of the customary
idiosyncrasies while traveling, part of background noise on the roads and nothing
more…

Just when I get terribly frustrated about this system and finally decide to pen it down, I read something like this in the newspaper:
“Zardari convoy holds up traffic, woman delivers in 3-wheeler”